OLICA won me over, but it wasn’t easy. I doubted its modern French-American menu would live up to its raves for the simple reason that even the best place can wilt after five months of “omigod” write-ups.

My own system was wilting from the heat, and I had no stomach for rich dishes like duck liver foie gras and sweetbreads. In fact, my first meal had me sharpening the stiletto.

Some of the food was damn good, but, aha! The room, which photographs well, turns out to have two fat pillars that block views, and creaky banquettes that rock like Shea Stadium bleachers.

What about big, braised sweetbreads ($25) that wore out their welcome as they turned dry and tough? What about the indifferent waiter who made us feel we were in a coffee shop?

But a few nights later, we had a better table and a better waiter. By lunch last week, I had fallen in love with the place. You will, too. Just don’t let them stick you behind the pillars or at tables that face a curtain like the front row of a jetliner.

With colorful wall patterns and sconces and a square wheatgrass patch in the midst of things, Olica is pretty enough. But you go for Alsatian-born chef Jean-Yves Schillinger’s cooking. Even with lots of French words on the menu, his poised and provocative style is more about marrying French technique to Modern American elements and sensibility.

Schillinger’s virtuosity with familiar elements invites double-takes. Cube-shaped tournedos of immaculate tuna ($14) are seared evenly, their centers left raw. The cooked and uncooked portions meld so seamlessly, and abruptly, that it looks like two different pieces of fish. Mustard oil and sea salt draw forth every spore of hot-cold pleasure.

In another dazzler, red and yellow tomatoes ($13) are steamed, diced, and arrayed into matched “carpaccio” semicircles separated by a flat Parmesan crisp and topped with sliced olives. The crystalline fruit draws summer into the windowless room.

Olica’s raw materials are first-rate. John Dory ($29), hard to find in these parts, doesn’t look like much, but wow, what thrills in simplicity! It came with a skewer of sweet, sesame-crusted shrimp formed into squares and divided by crisp onion slices.

Endearingly pink salmon ($23), seared on one side, arrives with a baby-skin softness. It’s served in a shocking-green fresh herb sauce verdant with scallion, spinach, thyme and tomato. Herbs take a star turn as well in the form of aromatic broth poured over rounds of buttery, pink roast lamb filet ($28) crusted with black trumpet mushrooms and wrapped in cabbage. A little garden of fava beans, tomatoes and onions makes a sparkling counterpoint.

My favorite dessert from pastry chef Raphael Sutter was a “millefeuille” that’s 2,997 layers short, with three cello-shaped crisps sandwiching strawberries and lemon curd. Served with champagne sorbet that could pass for the grape itself, it makes the August blahs disappear. If only it could do the same to those darned pillars.

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Of all the places to misidentify a chef. Michael Perselay, whom I blamed for Nyla’s food last week, had left the restaurant before my visits. Apologies to him and our readers.